It involves work. Before Musk's takeover Twitter was reliable, predictable and somewhat boring. Now it is none of those things, for better or worse. I think people see federation as a means to avoid a similar outcome in the future.
> Now that Elon owns it, well, now it sucks and is bad.
I mean... yes? No need to examine this through an ideological lens: the simple fact is that the future of Twitter is now very uncertain. Ad revenue is tanking, half the staff has been laid off, features are being modified on the fly. It simply isn't a service you can rely on right now.
In what ways? And in what ways do you think federated servers that don't agree on what rules to apply and lack any sort of mechanism for global, centralized control will make Mastodon reliable, predictable or even somewhat boring?!?
For instance :
IFTTT forced to remove Twitter triggers to comply with new API policies :
You are right about the chaotic way things are added/removed right now, but I personally prefer it to what Twitter was before Musk: Force login on the main page and unfair ideological censorship.
We'll see what happens in the long run.
It was none of those things and was widely regarded to be the worst-run company in tech not named Theranos or WeWork, including on this very website. It's fine to dislike Musk and it's fine to dislike the moves he's made but this revisionist history has to stop.
It's also a good idea not to build a house on a floodplain, or in an area with high risk of fire. People tend to do so anyway until the area floods or burns.
Thanks to Federal insurance programs that were implemented pre-climate crisis, they continue to build there after too, for the most part.
You are right, I, like many people, believe Elon is going to ruin Twitter, possibly bankrupting it. Therefore it is worth looking at alternatives. The ruining of Twitter makes alternatives more attractive.
Because it's hard to write any other way when people are losing their minds over a storm in a teacup. Literally nothing meaningful has changed about Twitter in the last few months. This is an entirely self-induced panic, based on a couple cases of someone maliciously misinterpreting a tweet here and there and everyone else amplifying it, and fueled by irrational fear and hatred towards Musk. It would be funny to watch, if it were not saturating the media channels 24/7.
Twitter's future wasn't in any way more certain before, nor was the platform any more stable. Adding or removing random features, and screwing third parties over API T&C changes, were pretty much the trademark of Twitter already.
I am not sure that a social network full of left-wing activits will be very palatable to the average moderate user.
For most people using social media outside of the context of a professional organization, it also means trusting whoever operates the instance, most of which will probably be less reliable and potentially trustworthy than Twitter was or currently is under Musk ownership.
However, in general, just because something didn’t take off initially doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea. Often it just goes to show that inertia is an extremely powerful force. People are often willing to continue with a substandard solution if it’s the one they’re used to or have been using for a while.
And so often a newer, superior, competitor requires the incumbent to make a misstep before they stand a chance at shining.
If it is the case, I don't see how Musk takeover could possibly affect their personal experience with the platform, since if they think some tweets should be censored, surely they won't follow the people writing those tweets or re-tweeting them in the first place?
If this is the case the only possible reason for leaving twitter is that they don't want to use a platform that enables people they disapprove of to communicate between them. But isn't it exactly what Mastodon does?
They don't seem like good answers, just happen-stance ones.
The idea of decentralising isn't bad IMO, maybe that'll be the next main topic.
Is there something bad about that? People are free to choose where they discuss things, and whom they give their money. He is tearing down moderation, crapping on verification, and injecting itself on electoral politics. Any CEO of Social Media that peddles on weird conspiracies of Pelosi's husband, and then just today announce that vote for Republicans...
What did you expect? That people will take it as "That's just Elon"...
Only sad aspect of this is that BlueSky project that supposedly allowed to move followers between servers was not ready, and he might not be particularly interested on allowing it anymore, as everyone would just flee with their followers.
Conservatives weren't satisfied with Parler, Truth Social, Gab or Gettr and now also own Twitter. It seems fairly obvious that people would seek alternatives because they're not interested in participating in a right-wing platform with no moderation.
That said, I have no interest in using Twitter now. But I want something that is basically Twitter, except without Elon Musk running it.
Anecdotally, most folks I know in the market for electric vehicles are avoiding Tesla so they don't have to think about a _specific_ billionaire each time they get into their car. Elon's especially visible right now, but generally, folks want their stuff to be theirs, not defined by someone else.
FWIW most of the people I'm thinking of skew technical and progressive.
In my vision of the future internet, when you upgrade your phone, your old phone gets plugged into a power socket and USB drive in the corner and becomes your new selfhosting server. You have apps for Mastodon, Nextcloud, Jellyfin, Plex, calendars, whatever.
The key pieces missing are simple tunneling services (think ngrok with a GUI designed for selfhosters), easier domain name management, and porting apps to run on phones. The most difficult is the last one but I'm hopeful that virtualization will take care of that in the near future[0], and maybe things like Wasm in the long run.
EDIT: PS - If you're interested in making this world a reality, join us over at https://forum.indiebits.io/
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/ybq4ih/pixel_7_has...
Try explaining to the influencer celeb why they should self-host. In fact, just try explaining to them they need to pick a mastodon instance, any instance. "it's so easy." No it's not.
All of their content could be self-hosted: videos, music, ebooks, etc. It’s a rails server, so in theory all of that stuff could be baked in.
Why would you do that in the first place? They can self-host if they want.
But I do wish selfhosting was just easy. It shouldn't be this hard.
There very well may be exceptional cases (famous people regularly going viral), but they wouldn't want to be hosting from a home location anyway.
Otherwise , mastodon hosters will become sneaky corporate spies, ad injectors and data resellers
Companies like name.com, godaddy and whatnot should offer that kind of option. Or even AWS should have a "managed mastodon" server maybe. At the end of the day, most companies nowadays have their infrastructure in one of the 4-6 main cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCS, Oracle, ...).
Install pleroma. Or mastodon. Or pixelfed (for images). Or peertube (for videos). Or plume (for blogging). Clicks in a UI.
No, it's about a whole beehive of drama queens who thought Twitter is their domain, who saw their hated rich man prove them wrong by literally buying it from under them.
One enormous consequence of how social media globalization works is that the attention span of the whole world becomes centralised. We can only talk about one thing or a few things at a time. Those become the hyper focus of the whole internet. In every forum those topics seep in. Trying to resist "the current thing" becomes very exhausting. It's very hard to even talk about local issues when there are a few big issues that draws everyone's attention. I feel like this is one of the most dramatic changes for the last two decennia.
It's even worse on the Fediverse, which is flooded with both Mastodon- and Twitter-related discussion.
Mastodon has gotten a boost, potentially orders of magnitude, in recent weeks as people evaluate their utility with Twitter.
As a new fediverse explorer, it is fun in a way MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter were at first.
But if there is an official CNN Mastodon instance, it’s suddenly real easy to see if someone claiming to be a CNN reporter is real or not.
Are they @john.smith@cnn.news? If not they’re a fake.
It would also work for official Microsoft accounts or Colgate-Palmolive or the government.
Seems like a good idea to me. And if you like federation it sounds better than a semi-official instance everyone uses that verifies things, sort of recreating a mini-Twitter “super” instance that is “more equal” than the others.
Like sure, slack / teams can see all your data, but if you have a trivial problem such as being in the EU, you suddenly now have a compliance problem if specific data gets put on the service.
Run mattermost on your own server and many of the problems go away.
Mastodon is a bit different because it's federated, but I assume since it's more akin to a social network, it's similar to running a community support website compliance wise.
check your company intranet. chances are probably great you can find your own 'twitter' clone struggling in an overcommitted vmware instance or chugging along on a second generation Intel pizza box somewhere in a forgotten closet. These things never got patched because the implementation came from the vendor (along with free merch), so theres no local knowledge on how to fix them if they ever break. If you look hard enough, you might even find the add-on "blogging" platform your company got sold when they complained discount twitter for the office wasnt engaging anyone.
Twitter and Instagram are “free”. Running servers costs money, made more expensive by the choice in the Mastodon design to not support virtual hosting on a per-domain basis. You have to run (and admin) a complete new instance of Mastodon for each domain you wish to support.
It would be really really nice if it was easier for small organizations. For big organizations they're already in the business of running their own websites and this isn't anything new.
2000 active users for $89 per month[1]. That's probably less than you would spend on toilet paper for 2000 employees. I don't think money would be the biggest reason why an organization or company wouldn't commit to the Fediverse.
Mastodon is also a DigitalOcean 1-click app[2] if you're willing to spend more time.
sometime in ~2018, Mastodon (IIRC -- it might have been a specific instance) implemented inter-user messaging over ActivityPub, showing users only messages addressed to them -- since it wasn't actually part of the spec, the rest of the Fediverse saw them as regular feed messages.
Mastodon users assumed DMs were private and got burned, other instance operators were all of a sudden flooded with non-post messages, and everything was generally pretty suck-y until everyone got their shit together.
this sort of thing happens periodically (see: Gab's federation flooding the network in a similar way), it's a consequence of different entities trying to develop individual features over a unifying protocol.
Hey, did you hear about this amazing product @insertYourNameHere?
1. DMs can be restricted to followed profiles.
2. Abuse can be reported and admins will likely act. Such a spam would be a once-and-done affair.
3. I'd need to check the spec / code, but suspect there's an upper bound on the number of profiles which can be mentioned in a single toot.
I'm not saying there's no opportunity for abuse. But on the whole, and on a cost-benefit assessment for the spammer, there are probably more viable options for spreading a message.
Oh interesting! Let me check out their instance that they linked to: "Find us at https://toot.thoughtworks.com"
> This is a Mastodon instance solely for employees of Thoughtworks.
Whoops!
In general, I don't see how this helps a company at all to reach the millions of users that they could through Facebook or Twitter. On those platforms, it's automatic and immediate. On Mastodon, it seems like you have to actively court users one at a time? Because ThoughtWorks wasn't even able to reach me, and I read their entire article. I went directly to their instance and learned nothing.
EDIT:
Aha! It turns out that the landing page is a red herring, and you can still click through to the "See What's Happening" page. I don't see how a non-technical user would figure this out and not get immediately discouraged. Linking to the /public page would have made a lot more sense.
On a blog post about running your own instance to reach millions of users, why does it turn out that their instance is totally locked down and actually not accessible to anyone?
I know people made fun of “tweet” but it was a logical and neutral word.
https://til.simonwillison.net/mastodon/custom-domain-mastodo...
<https://joinfediverse.wiki/How_to_host_your_own_Fediverse_in...>
While I do not align with these people politically, I applaud their desires and encourage them to continue taking action to own smaller spaces instead of us all trying to fight over the monolithic centralized large spaces. As I've said several times on HN now, I am not particularly convinced in the long term that massive centralized communities are practical because the intersection of all community social norms is essentially the null set, or at the very least, much smaller than anyone wants to be confined to. The fact that all of the major sites sourced from a particular geographical location with particular dominant political beliefs was a historical anomaly that won't be replicated.
Perhaps, philosophically speaking of course, this is not such a bad thing? Maybe societal change should be slow and deliberate.
> The fact that all of the major sites sourced from a particular geographical location with particular dominant political beliefs was a historical anomaly that won't be replicated.
This is a good point that I have not yet considered directly, just through one-off rantings about how everything tech for the longest time was Valley-centered. I can't help but think that a shift away is a good thing long term.
Narratives?
Mastodon has no nazis, it does have that going for them.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/783akg/mastodon-is-like-twit...
(I know you've included a link, but it's such a long op-ed with no summary and it doesn't immediately mention decision making, so I don't feel like there's a guarantee of a pay off from reading it.)
I tried to keep less specific because it doesn't matter to a great deal. We both lack a tardis and cannot change the past.
I'm not a gab user, I got an awesome username but it's a shitty echo chamber worse than anywhere else. Fundamentally "Gab" forked mastodon because masotodon banned them off the fediverse. But more importantly mastodon made it clear they do not represent free speech and have the ability to remove political opponents.
There's tons of speech on GAB and what percentage is 'hate speech'? can you even define hate speech really? It's not all speech on the platform. The correct way to read the blog is they banned their political opponents because they have free speech policies. This was a huge mistake for mastodon. Something they can basically never recover from.
One of the persistent issues in political polarization has been labelling your political opponents. Republicans are all nazis?
Since Mastodon is federated, running your own instance is largely transparent to most Mastodon and Fediverse users. You're simply another profile on another instance. Content will federate.
What operating your own server does provide is:
1. Control over your own services. Notably, over what other instances can federate to it --- Adam Davidson (ex of New Yorker, NYT, NPR, etc.) discovered this yesterday: <https://journa.host/@adamdavidson/109297137123981377>. But also moderation and content policies as well as operational and provisioning decisions.
2. An additional indicia of who you really are. BigCo@FlippantMastodonInstance.Whatevs might or might not indicate strong branding. BigCo@BigCo.TLD (especially where BigCo.TLD is already strongly established) is stronger branding.
3. For those not yet using Mastodon, the self-hosted server will be a single point at which content can be viewed. Note that this is marked distinction from the practice of the past decade or so of relying on social media services which were effectively walled gardens: Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and the like.
4. DMs are visible to an instance's admin. Self-hosting means that the organisation would control that particular exposure as well.
Much as BigCo would be expected to operate or present its own website or blog, and frequently its own email server (or at least domains pointed at hosted services), so too with self-hosted Mastodon.
Well, it finally happened in a undisputable, greatest possible example kinda way, and now everyone is scrambling to adjust.
At Facebook we used a facebook-esque product called Workplace for this sort of thing. I believe it harmed the culture because people would chase clout and visibility on the social network instead of doing real work. Social networks encourage that kind of behavior.
I think slack, discord, or similarly un-networked products are a better fit for company communication. Anything that shows "follower counts" is probably not good for companies.
1. How much does it cost?
2. Who does it benefit?
3. Who takes the ownership of the deployment?
4. If something needs to be fixed with the deployment, who does that?
5. Why should I prefer this over say slack/teams, where I get support bundled in my contract?
6. What happens if someone puts up something nasty on the internal mastodon network? The legal department hates this one weird trick.
7. Does it create a headache for the HR department if people start violating their corporate code of conduct on the mastodon network?
Maybe I am pessimistic, but OP is probably being quite dreamy here.
in the end communities with maximum participation will always be where creators are incentivized to be.
until the average user becomes willing to pay for X, ad based revenue models will always win. relatedly, paying for X is easier than setting up your own mastodon server.
I was recently brainstorming some ideas with a friend who has a 1-person business where it would make sense for clients to be able to connect with each other. The thought of Mastodon briefly crossed my mind, but it seemed too ambitious.
